Breathless

A popular movie on the festival circuit this past year, this Korean movie stars its first-time director as a yobbish gangland hardman collecting debts with maximum force and dispersing demonstrating students with baseball bats. He's addicted to violence and as likely to beat up his colleagues as those he's hired to work over, and it's all due to his family background. He takes up with a high-school girl after meeting cute by spitting on her tie, and her obscene language and attitudes are much like his because her father is a violent, alcoholic Vietnam veteran and her brother a vicious thug. The film has an undoubted authenticity, but is something of an endurance test.